Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Flight said:

EQ raid loot dropped like candy when starting out ?
.

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Holy crap I got a broken copy then! I don"t remember "candy" like loot dropping, in fact I remember just the opposite?

Not to mention the "cool" stuff. I was a monk, the end all be all for me, for awhile, was the RotWF. I camped Raster for 2 weeks, 2 friggin weeks, and got him. (Sad part was the monk behind me got Raster on the VERY NEXT SPAWN CYCLE!!!).

The thing to me is, and it"s hard to grasp but true imo, what was "great" and "fun" is being tarnished by time. It was great and fun, THEN, but now, not so much. Can you fathom the CS nightmare if something akin to the Raster camp existed in WoW?

Better yet, can you imagine farming the 9 eyes needed for Prismatic zone entry in EQ2, in WoW today? There would be websites created about that, and songs written.

We EQ players are famous for the "Back in my day...uphill...snow...barefoot"
stories but in reality the larger player base does NOT share our nostalgic views of what was and was not cool. I think there is merit in that, and then not so much....

The big thing is, and this is one of the reasons I venture onto forums here and elsewhere, we"re not making "MY GAME". We can"t, there"s too much epic fail in listening to me 24/7 no matter how cool I think my idea is. I do think I know the space well, I do think I have some good ideas, but there are methods and processes to vetting those as there are with every designer.

Do I fear falling into the EQ3 trap? Define that.
Do I fear not being different enough? Use to, not any more.
Do I hate Danuser for not letting me tell you more? Does the Sun rise in the East?
Do I think we are onto something unique, different and incredibly compelling? Ya I do.

Ngruk said:

Holy crap I got a broken copy then! I don"t remember "candy" like loot dropping, in fact I remember just the opposite?

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Opposite of candy?

..
Poison?

Flight said:

Most of the people here were in leading edge guilds. Raiding was wiping all night, every night, for weeks, learning strats against mostly broken, cock block content. GoD was worse, because it was designed and balanced for level 70 players, then they somehow decided to remove the raised level limit with that expansion before it launched.

Sure once it was down and you practised it, bosses went on farm status, but the majority of the time raiding was like poking yourself in the eye with a red hot needle.

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Definitely. It seemed to devolve, but it wasn"t rosy at the start, either, and it definitely went from bad to worse.

There were very few leading edge guilds early on. Nag and Vox were never on farm status on most servers until ROK. Trak was a nightmare when Kunark was released, and it took months for most of the best guilds to even get a kill. One time we had Trak down and almost dead and we all were booted from the server.

Disconnects were waaay more common 10 years ago. I think people forget how easy it was to zone somewhere and have ones whole raid disco.

The first few years of EQ, there weren"t a lot of guilds farming anything. Heck, some of the wipeouts in Fear and Hate early on were epic enough to require GM intervention, and the participants would have to head to Guk or Sol B to go back to 50 from 45.

I wish EQ had spent more time developing the game and improving things, instead of just rolling out expansion after expansion in a kneejerk mudflation manner. This was more pronounced later on as they released buggier and buggier expansions on the same accelerated time schedule.

Fear was a fickle bitch, it just depended on the time of month I guess. One day you walk in and get like two piece of shit Druid drops and that goddamn Ranger axe about thirty times. The next and half your wizards walk out with a full damn suit of planar gear and a fireball burning up their asshole. Hate was much the same way.

A lesson should be learned from this. And that lesson is that best in slot items dropping from fucking trash istotally awesomeand should definitely be repeated! Honestly why do I have to kill bosses to get my shit? Totally unfair.

James said:

Fear was a fickle bitch, it just depended on the time of month I guess. One day you walk in and get like two piece of shit Druid drops and that goddamn Ranger axe about thirty times. The next and half your wizards walk out with a full damn suit of planar gear and a fireball burning up their asshole. Hate was much the same way.

A lesson should be learned from this. And that lesson is that best in slot items dropping from fucking trash istotally awesomeand should definitely be repeated! Honestly why do I have to kill bosses to get my shit? Totally unfair.

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Fear and Hate dropping decent loot off trash also meant that other guilds could go in and farm, etc even without the bosses up.

Caliane said:

Opposite of candy?

..
Poison?

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vegetables probably

Obviously I am also opposed to Raster-esque type camps as the norm. However I think there is a place for them alongside more attainable type shit.

If someone wants to spend their time on something like a Raster camp then have at it. The problem for me came when cockblock shit like Raster was almost necessary to elevate your char to the place where you want it.

I like the concept of rares spawning in a completely random fashion and having a unique loot table. If you are in an area and a "named" spawns then if you can get enough people quickly and feel you are up to the task, you go for it.

These mobs would also be on a despawn timer that would be as fast as the devs want it. This could be very rewarding and each situation is more or less unique.

Yes, everyone hated the Raster type camps, but think of what happened to your heart rate when the mob you have camped for eternity finally popped.
This was especially invigorating on pvp servers when there were other human foes nearby also responding to the spawn.

Twobit Whore said:

That"d be great if running a heroic and getting some 180dps epic from the last boss was the be-all end-all of WoW.

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Are the "raiders" of this forum so myopic that you really think that the vast majority of WoW players don"t top out at the stage where all they do is run heroics, lose BG"s, and try to put together failed Naxx25 and VoA raids?

Maybe if you are raiding as much as you imply, you"re insulated from the casuals. But it"s a fact: WoW is casuals. For every "raider" who is looking at some meaningful raid weapon or crazy rare raid mount, there"s 100 more players screaming in /trade about how they need a "geared" group to do a timed Culling of Stratholme run so they can get their Bronze Drake finally, since after 10 attempts, schucks, they haven"t been able to do it!

Every time I read where someone DOESN"T accept that WoW is mostly casual retards who want nothing more than to do "geared" heroic runs and purchase the best purples the Auction House can offer, I wonder if being in a raid guild really does insulate you from the general population that much.

Zeste said:

This conditioning method has a much weaker resistance to extinction. It"s like a clock. As soon as those hand stops moving, you know it"s broke and throw it away or replace the battery. How many people quit until Ulduar came out, since the rewards were just got? Got all their Valor badge loot, their KT and Maly loot... now what? There"s no rewards, and no need for any patience or commitment since you know nothing is coming. You can map out your EXACT path for Heroism/Valor/Conquest badge loot, your exact time commitment for farming Honor and getting PvP gear, check your map for herb or mining nodes, everything. As soon as there is a pause or a drought in reward, interest immediately dies off.


There"s a reason why EQ is nostalgic and seems like the "golden age" and WoW does not. It has very little to do with the "content" and everything to do with how the game doled out said content and how each company chose to condition the human brain.

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Very very good post.

As far as WOW"s rewards being so predictable go I actually have no interest even at the point that I don"t yet have a reward. Because I know if I spent x hours in y dungeon I would have z loot so I can actually weigh the time I will need to spend in game with instead going to play in a pool tournament and decide not to bother playing WOW that day. In EQ you had no assurances. You might get a Glowing Black Stone in 2 hours of camping but if you are brutally unlucky you might not have one after two weeks of camping. The fact is though, that unpredictability and the fact I had no clue if today was my lucky day MADE me want to gamble and find out.

In this regard EQ gave you a sense of "gambling" your time and effort to get things, you had a chance to win the jackpot on the first spin of a slot machine, or you might sit there all day not winning anything and losing your shirt. The fact that you DID NOT KNOW was part of the excitement. The random named mobs in EQ, the rare loot those mobs dropped, the rare Frenzied ghoul respawns and the hope that it would be JACKPOT Flowing Black Sash! That added a huge amount of excitment to gameplay in EQ for me and from day 1 in WOW I really really missed it.

In new games I want that sense of gambling again. I want that feeling of slogging through 2-7 offsuit, 3-10 offsuit, hoping the next hand I get dealt will be aces, yet seeing a 8-4 offsuit and then hoping "well ok the NEXT hand might be aces! Cripe, I have to be getting due for a good hand". It was that gamble and anticipation of random events in EQ that gave me alot of the hook that kept me always wanting to play and do things in that game.

Tropics said:

In new games I want that sense of gambling again. I want that feeling of slogging through 2-7 offsuit, 3-10 offsuit, hoping the next hand I get dealt will be aces, yet seeing a 8-4 offsuit and then hoping "well ok the NEXT hand might be aces! Cripe, I have to be getting due for a good hand". It was that gamble and anticipation of random events in EQ that gave me alot of the hook that kept me always wanting to play and do things in that game.

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Something tells me you also like to hook your balls up to some electrodes, and shock them with 10k volts of electricity in your spare time. You don"t go actively looking for gameplay like that, you get fucking conned into it.

Ngruk said:

Holy crap I got a broken copy then! I don"t remember "candy" like loot dropping, in fact I remember just the opposite?

Not to mention the "cool" stuff. I was a monk, the end all be all for me, for awhile, was the RotWF. I camped Raster for 2 weeks, 2 friggin weeks, and got him. (Sad part was the monk behind me got Raster on the VERY NEXT SPAWN CYCLE!!!).

The thing to me is, and it"s hard to grasp but true imo, what was "great" and "fun" is being tarnished by time. It was great and fun, THEN, but now, not so much. Can you fathom the CS nightmare if something akin to the Raster camp existed in WoW?

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I am hoping that you can at least give us some of both. WOW"s instant gratification can satiate the masses with standard decent loot that gets them along in their quest to max level. But add some of what EQ gave as well in regards to rare loot, take for instance the Sword that dropped in Zul Farak, that was a throwback type of loot that makes me think of EQ. It was an item that many people camped like crazy, they would run ZF, they would not get it, they would finish the instance and then immediately find another group and go right back into ZF. I would LOVE to see most instances and boss mobs have certain pieces of loot that are of the truly "rare" variety and have those pieces of loot be somewhat better then the standard predictable fair those bosses normally drop. I would love to have zones with more "rare" mobs such as Scarlet Monastary graveyard had with it"s rare mob that dropped some pretty decent loot at times.

It is not a bad thing to give the players some predictable loot in an instance but to remove the rare stuff, to remove the items that made people go "WOW, that is cool, I cannot believe we got that to drop" not having that stuff and that type of feeling hurts WOW greatly IMO. In EQ virtually everything was that "WOW" type of thing when it dropped, a Ykesha, a pair of J-Boots, a FBSS, Lockjaw spawns in the Oasis and noobs swarm towards him hoping to get the most damage and get the loot, the Pegasis in South Karana spawns and you hope to heck you win and that he might have the levitation leggings, a level 11 noob flukes out and gets a Glowing Black Stone and is the sudden equivalent of the smiling face you see on a Casino Wall sitting beside a slot that just paid off the jackpot, all of those things having a rare chance of happening kept my interest far more then WOW has ever managed to with it"s common predictable loot and rare non-mob specific world blue and epic drops "ohh, I killed a normal crocodile and it dropped a epic bow, neat..." "WOW a rare mob, wow, it was easy to kill and drop a worthless green, neat..."

EQ worked because you had, what, 2 other options to play an MMO?

You could play Asherons Call, or go back to Ultima Online, which wasn"t even really a mmo.

Then, what was next, Dark Age of Camelot? We all played that for a week!

The "grind" of old EQ would never, ever work again. Can you imagine Hell Levels again? Go try and explain them to a WoW player who never did vanilla EQ.

"So wait, after 30 ever 5th level was like 100 times longer than a regular one, and you spent that time pulling spider-human chicks to the northwall of karnors in the dreadlands?!?"

I know. Don"t you miss the days of 5 guilds camping the same random mob spawn location 0068 24/7 with massive pvp battles while waiting for the lord emperor of all assrape to spawn so you can tag it 2 delicious seconds before any other guild that"s been camping it all day does and gain 1 half of the sword of almighty "get a fucking life" drops and be the 1 player out of 3000 to have +500 to all your stats and a shiny glow coming out of your ass. All so you could do it again 72 hours later?

What fun!

James said:

Something tells me you also like to hook your balls up to some electrodes, and shock them with 10k volts of electricity in your spare time. You don"t go actively looking for gameplay like that, you get fucking conned into it.

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And something tells me you are part of the silver spoon generation of kids who expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter, surrounded in everything they ask for and always then just wanting and expecting more, never truly satisfied. You were the kid in the grocery store at 3 years old throwing a fit because your mom wont buy you TWO chocolate bars instead of just one, and then she being a gimp pays you off for your little tantrum and buys you the two chocolate bars, assuring that the next time in the store the whole scene would be repeated.

Trust me, I am not at all surprised that some people look at MMORPG"s and game developers the same they looked at chocolate bars and their mom back when they were 3.

Zeste said:

The "grind" of old EQ would never, ever work again. Can you imagine Hell Levels again? Go try and explain them to a WoW player who never did vanilla EQ.

"So wait, after 30 ever 5th level was like 100 times longer than a regular one, and you spent that time pulling spider-human chicks to the northwall of karnors in the dreadlands?!?"

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There is no way the grind would work with EQ"s world design. BUT if a game adds alot of rich quest content and good group, dungeon and even mini-raid content at the level ranges in question you can sure as hell have alot longer levels then WOW offers.

One of the big problems WOW has with dungeons and loot is that if you get the best item in the game for yourself at level 30 it is pretty much worthless 10 hours of play later, which makes that item pretty much "meh" the minute you get it.

In EQ when you got a good item for your level at least that item meant something because you would be using it for a lot longer time.

EQ was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but WOW is a far cry from the holy friggin grail as well. Both games went way too far to one extreme or the other. Somewhere in the middle of those 2 extremes is a pretty solid meanginful MMORPG experience.

Tropics said:

And something tells me you are part of the silver spoon generation of kids who expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter, surrounded in everything they ask for and always then just wanting and expecting more, never truly satisfied. You were the kid in the grocery store at 3 years old throwing a fit because your mom wont buy you TWO chocolate bars instead of just one, and then she being a gimp pays you off for your little tantrum and buys you the two chocolate bars, assuring that the next time in the store the whole scene would be repeated.

Trust me, I am not at all surprised that some people look at MMORPG"s and game developers the same they looked at chocolate bars and their mom back when they were 3.

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Don"t assume shit about shit you don"t know, slick. I"m fairly certain I played EQ "more hardk0re" than you ever did.

There"s a happy medium between your vision of nut shattering disappointment, and Zehn"s free-flowing loot schmorgisborg of homosexual assfucking gayness. Any retard can slap a 1% drop rate on an item, make it a little better than standard, and call it a day. Likewise, any retard can make every boss drop a token or three and give you what you want with no worry about randomness at all. Neither is a good model.

Proper loot placement, good stat distribution, a limited amount of items for every slot, equal stat power across the board; there"s a whole number of things that make for a good loot system, none of which have anything to do with how random they are or aren"t.

To make a long story short, you can take your 36 hour Rubicite Breastplate camps and shove them straight the fuck up your asshole.

<img src=http://www.fohguild.org/forums/attachments/mmorpg-general-discussion/108523d1241147783-fighting-over-dragons-rubicite.jpg>

Tropics said:

And something tells me you are part of the silver spoon generation of kids who expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter, surrounded in everything they ask for and always then just wanting and expecting more, never truly satisfied. You were the kid in the grocery store at 3 years old throwing a fit because your mom wont buy you TWO chocolate bars instead of just one, and then she being a gimp pays you off for your little tantrum and buys you the two chocolate bars, assuring that the next time in the store the whole scene would be repeated.

Trust me, I am not at all surprised that some people look at MMORPG"s and game developers the same they looked at chocolate bars and their mom back when they were 3.

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And something tells me this is you in the video

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James said:

There"s a happy medium between your vision of nut shattering disappointment, and Zehn"s free-flowing loot schmorgisborg of homosexual assfucking gayness. Any retard can slap a 1% drop rate on an item, make it a little better than standard, and call it a day. Likewise, any retard can make every boss drop a token or three and give you what you want with no worry about randomness at all. Neither is a good model.

Proper loot placement, good stat distribution, a limited amount of items for every slot, equal stat power across the board; there"s a whole number of things that make for a good loot system, none of which have anything to do with how random they are or aren"t.

To make a long story short, you can take your 36 hour Rubicite Breastplate camps and shove them straight the fuck up your asshole.

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Well said.

Guild app denied, though. Your charisma blows goats.

James said:

There"s a happy medium between your vision of nut shattering disappointment, and Zehn"s free-flowing loot schmorgisborg of homosexual assfucking gayness.

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Wow, if you could read this would be so much easier.

EQ was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but WOW is a far cry from the holy friggin grail as well. Both games went way too far to one extreme or the other. Somewhere in the middle of those 2 extremes is a pretty solid meanginful MMORPG experience.

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But if you instead want to simply parrot what I say in later posts go nuts I guess.

While we"re on loot, can you 38S guys please make sure the in game freebies for the CE are actually meaningful. Anarchy Online founders got this backpack (with stats !!) that is, to this day, one of the rarest items in the game, because it"s still so special.

Doesn"t need to be game breaking, just long term useful (eg small stat boost) and not just eye candy.